Gala Tomasso was born in Edinburgh and brought up in the new town of Livingston, West Lothian. Gala followed her family and moved to the west of Ireland in 2000 currently settled in Connemara with strong roots in Clare and Galway county.

Her interest and creative development stemmed from encouragement given by her artistic parents form a very young age. This creativity also evolved as a coping mechanism and the need to escape the chaos of a dysfunctional childhood. Gala immersed herself in art-making, drawing, sewing, and modelling.

On completion of an arts degree at the University of Worcester, a Baccalaureate in Fine Art at The Burren College of Art and a Masters in Professional Design Practice from Dublin, she settled in the West and has continued her creative practice. Gala has worked both in the commercial and fine art domain, producing many commissioned and collaborative projects. Her work can be found in private collections, adorning high end retail design products and in high profile event visual communication output, as well as books, retail promotional products and educational courseware.

Gala’s practice has expanded to include many mediums mixing traditional methods like embroidery and paper with digital drawing and lino cut print.

Her most recent commercial contracts include Coffee Works and Press, Ard Bia, The Nest, Mocha Beans, Baboro and the 2020 offices.

Artist Says…

Having always drawn, my visual diaries are full of illustrations, capturing moments — the little things we might normally oversee.

I ‘picture make’ emotion when I am developing work. I create art as a meditation to calm the busy mind. Everything has creative energy and that energy transmutes into subject matter. A drawing needs to pull from the character of the object or person or place. Perhaps pulling from the ‘energy’ it emits, in order to be valid or plausible.

Places, maps, objects, streets, toys, plants, everything around us has an energy which can be reinterpreted into a drawing, a Lino print or craftwork.

Visually communicating our plant environment, our domestic or architectural landscape, rural areas where nature holds her own next to man made road ways and concrete out-buildings, my illustrations strive to capture moment and place. The illustrations hold simple details, quirks, bends, colours and characters that a classic render may be unable to convey.

My work strives to find the joy in places and things we know, the joy in places and things that we sometimes forget to see and the positive energy in the places and things we are familiar with but have not taken a moment to actually ‘feel’.